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ABSTRACT

The Ruth story has traditionally been cast as a bucolic one about magnanimous folk doing marvelous things for what would be, by and large, philanthropic and charitable reasons only.  Acknowledging that real humans have real feelings and resolutely refusing to bowdlerize a text about assumably real persons, I decline to assume the main protagonists in the Book of Ruth to be paragons of virtue. Moreover, I argue that the default meaning of the term חֶ֖סֶד hesed as covenant loyalty is erroneous, which I argue is better defined as “situational strength.” Ruth’s two acts of hesed, rather than emanating from covenantal loving-kindness, may more accurately be described as having flowed from a position of situational strength. Read as a story about flesh-and-blood people, the text suggests that Ruth was a woman of fortitude, who unabashedly used all her womanly appeal to work around prevailing social norms and found a way through the thickets of a patriarchy in a foreign culture, to boot, where her personal interests were not necessarily paramount to those around her, Naomi included.  In the end, with Boaz playing ball, so to speak, things did work out well for this resolute woman.  Therefore, Boaz’s characterization of the acts of this dauntless חַ֖יִל אֵ֥שֶׁת as being those of hesed would seem to have been quite apposite.

撮 要

路得的故事傳統上被描繪成一個田園式的故事，講述一個是寬宏大量的人為了慈善做了許多了不起的事情。我承認真實的人有真實的情感，並堅決拒絕貶低一個假設的真實人物的文本。因此我拒絕假設路得記的主角是美德的典範。此外，我認為חֶ֖סֶד hesed 一詞作為盟約忠誠的預設含義是錯誤的，我認為最好將其定義為「情境力量」。路得的兩次 hesed 行為，與其說是源於盟約中的慈愛，不如說是源於情境中的力量更為準確。作為一個關於真實人物的故事，經文表明路得是一個堅韌的女人，她毫不掩飾地利用她所有的女性魅力來繞過現行的社會規範，並在異國文化的父權制叢中找到一條出路。她的個人利益對她周圍的人來說不一定是最重要的，拿俄米也包括在內。最終，在波阿斯的幫助下，這個剛毅的女人得到了很好的結果。因此，波阿斯將這個無畏的חַ֖יִל אֵ֥שֶׁת 的行為描述為hesed 的行為似乎是非常恰當的。

原載於《建道學刊》61期（2024年1月），頁29-50。